As implied from its title, this volume issues from the sixteenth meeting of the Comité International de Paléographie Latine, held in September 2008 at the Institute of English Studies, University of London. The Committee has met irregularly since 1953, but only since 1990 under a specific theme. The 1990 colloquium, for example, met under the theme "La datation des écritures, du XIIe au XVe siècle." The theme of the 2008 meeting, and thus of the present volume, "Teaching Writing, Learning to Write," is explored by twenty-one authors whose contributions are divided after six sub-headings, "Ancient and Early Medieval Practice" (contributions by Paolo Fioretti, David Ganz, Martin Steinmann, Patrizia Carmassi, and Aliza Cohen- Mushlin), "Learning to Write A Vernacular" (Annina Seiler, Alessandro Zironi, and Jerzy Kaliszuk), "Learning to Write in Northern Europe" (Åslaug Ommundsen, Erik Niblaeus, and Gudvardur Már Gunnlaugsson), "Learning to Write in Southern Europe" (Cristina Mantegna, Irene Ceccherini, Jesús Alturo, Carmen del Camino Martínez, and Maria do Rosário Barbosa Morujão), "Numbers and Abbreviations" (Charles Burnett and Olaf Pluta), and finally, "Iconographic Evidence" (Lucy Freeman Sandler, Alison Stones, and Berthold Kress). The topics covered by the contributions are wide-arching, temporally and conceptually, and range from "a sgraffio" writing in Ancient Rome (Fioretti) to the Hebrew, Greek and Latin alphabets of Paul Lautensack, an amateur theologian of early sixteenth-century Bamberg (Kress). Though the major part of the essays of the volume is written in English, a handful of contributions in German, Italian, French, and Spanish bespeak the international composition of the Committee.
As is to be expected from a volume of such varied contents, spanning almost the entire spectrum--geographical and historical--of Latin handwriting, the contributions are a mixed bag. There is, quite naturally, no guiding principle apart from the general theme, and a complete diachronic and geographical treatment is not to be expected. We learn, to mention but a few examples, about reading and writing pedagogies in Ancient Rome (Fioretti), about reading and writing Gothic among the Carolingians (Zironi), we gain insights into the scribal habits of a twelfth-century scriptorium on the Rhine (Cohen- Mushlin), and learn to appreciate the differences between professional and "lay" writing in the kingdom of Castile in the later medieval period (Martínez); but of the writing practices, for instance, among the Franks, the Merovingians, in southern Italy, in the French cathedral schools, we hear nothing. Nonetheless, different periods and regions, social strata and religious communities are surprisingly well-catered for among the contents. Represented if not wholly covered are, in addition to the above, the British Isles (Ganz), early medieval monasteries (Steinmann), the teaching of grammar in the Carolingian Age (Carmassi), writing vernaculars in the Germanic- speaking areas (Seiler), in Poland (Kaliszuk), reading and writing in the Scandinavian countries (Ommundsen, Niblaeus, and Gunnlaugsson), in Renaissance Italy (Mantegna, Ceccherini), in Catalonia (Alturo), and medieval Portugal (Morujão).
Regional and temporal aspects are straddled by Burnett in his treatment of how learning to write numerals was performed in the Middle Ages, particularly after the introduction of Arabic numerals from the late tenth century onwards, and iconographic evidence of scribal activity is brought into the picture by Sandler, Stones, and Kress. By Sandler we are informed, for instance (repeating a remark by Richard and Mary Rouse), that when medieval people heard the Latin word tabula, they were immediately thinking of a wax-tablet; hence in the English-produced Lichtenthal Psalter, Moses is found preparing to receive the Ten Commandments not as cut out on stone tablets but by gouging out the hollow of a wooden diptych with a gigantic chisel (plates 19.2 and 19.3).
Standing out among the essays as particularly thorough and well- written, according to my opinion and tastes, are the chapters by Niblaeus (10) and Pluta (18). Niblaeus has the courage to tackle twelfth-century Sweden, an area and period from which only few and primitive sources survive, or at least so it is thought. As Niblaeus points out, however, with the development of the church into an effective organization (receiving its first archbishop in 1164), particularly with the establishment of the first Cistercian monasteries, the period was of crucial importance for later civilizing movements. Niblaeus sets out to correct the prevailing opinion among scholars of twelfth-century Swedes as illiterate heathens with little or no capacity to receive a bookish culture from outside, let alone to learn how effectively to read and write. Using the rich collection of medieval parchment fragments housed at the Swedish National Archives, recently gathered into an excellent research database, Niblaeus is tentatively able to prove that a literary culture was far more widespread in twelfth-century Sweden than has previously been believed, even in areas such as Småland, renowned for being particularly wild and barbarous. Closing with some insightful observations on the notion of "awkwardness" of the handwriting apparent among many presumably Scandinavian scribes, Niblaeus concludes that rather than issuing from an inherent barbarity among native Swedes ("a scribe did not write differently because his grandfather happened to be a viking" 150), the "awkwardness" of a hand is often the result of a deliberately employed aesthetic, the origin of which is to be found among inadequate exemplars and an absence of canonical scribal norms.
Pluta's contribution consists of a study and edition of a late- medieval tutorial treatise for novice scribes; the Quaedam regulae de modo titulandi seu apificandi pro novellis scriptoribus copulatae is such a rare thing as a teach-yourself-how-to-guide for the correct abbreviation of Latin manuscripts, particularly, as specified by the text, "precious books, that is to say, Bibles and the like" (iste modus titulandi servari potest in libris pretiosis, scilicet in bibliis et huiusmodi) (243). There are sixteen rules listed by the treatise on when and how to abbreviate words, when and where the titulus, i.e. the abbreviation stroke normally placed above letters to indicate contraction, has to be placed in order not to confuse the reader, as well as how to use certain special letter forms. That the four editions of the treatise printed since 1841 have been unsatisfactory, is proved by a glance at Pluta's critical apparatus, where all mistakes of the previous editors are glaringly reproduced. It is disconcerting to learn, for example, that Glorieux in his 1973 edition of the text expanded the perfectly legible superuenit (fol. 194r) as sup(rae)veniat whatever that can be said to mean in Latin. To reproduce the manuscript as closely as possible, and thus to convey its message in the most accurate way, Pluta prints all examples used in the text diplomatically transcribed using special characters for tall s, round r, and abbreviations graphs for per as well as the various existing kinds of tituli employed by the scribe. The exemplary abbreviations are, furthermore, expanded within brackets into their correct form as an aid to the modern reader to fully appreciate the rules advocated by the treatise. This is all laudable editorial practice. What I cannot understand is the editor's decision, having put so much effort into providing a diplomatic transcription of the abbreviations examples, to alter the unique manuscript's orthography to confirm to classical Latin practices. Hence the manuscript's collapsed diphthongs are (a-historically) reinstated, its vacillating use of y for i normalized (to i, needless to say), as is its use of u for internal v. No doubt having done this with the best of intentions it would have been courteous of the editor to at least inform the interested reader of his grounds for imposing these standardizations to a manuscript text, of which he provides a full set of facsimiles.
Leaving the specifics for a few final general comments, it must be said that the volume is handsomely produced, the most striking feature perhaps being the many monochrome and full-color illustrations appended to most of the chapters, ranging from none (Ganz, Steinmann, Zironi, Gunnlaugsson, Alturo, and Morujão) to twenty-one (Stones). Indeed, this is a real reader's treat, and the fact that the images are found directly after their respective articles greatly helps improve the reading experience. The case of Pluta has already been mentioned. In spite of this, and strange as it may seem to say, in some cases I could wish there were more images; particularly Ganz's contribution (chapter 2) would have profited from being illustrated.
Despite its inconsistencies, at most times necessitated by the subject-matter, as explained above, I am certain that this volume will hit home in a number of camps and find a reasonably large and varied readership. I, for one, will certainly use some of the texts and images in teaching paleography.